Britain is not a police state but a nation with police state tendencies. In any democracy the dictates of freedom wrestle with those of security. Britons are a liberal people who want to be safe. Do they also want to live in a condition of perpetual paranoia?
In his five months of power, Gordon Brown has shown himself a tentative, uncertain leader, reluctant to confront admirals, bankers, property developers, American presidents, and now his own security apparatus. This final weakness is the most dangerous.
Under the same “fortress Britain” rubric as Tony Blair, his predecessor, Brown last week initiated a sudden and extraordinary set of measures curbing liberty in the name of security. They involve extending the present eccentric luggage checks at airports to 250 “strategic” train stations as well as to ferry ports, sports stadiums and other places of public resort.
A further 100 “sensitive” installations such as power stations and petrol plants are to be reconfigured against suicide car bombs. Architects are to redesign public buildings as blast resistant (and presumably windowless) on their lower storeys. Brown is insistent that security demands British citizens be subject to detention without trial, charge or even explanation for up to 56 days.
The public realm is here being medievalised at the bidding of Osama Bin Laden. According to the civil rights group Liberty, the 56-day infringement of habeas corpus compares with a maximum of one day in Canada and two days in America and Germany. The British limit is already 28 days and there is no evidence that this has impeded counterterrorism. The 56-day proposal is rather a display of machismo and a leitmotif of loyalty to the prime minister.
The steady extension of discretionary detention 56 represents a collapse in democracy’s ability to curb the repressive tendencies in any security regime. It suggests a drift towards banana republicanism, towards regimes that survive on perpetual states of emergency, in thrall to some bullying police chief or paranoid spymaster.
It was Blair who said, extraordinarily, that it would be irresponsible of him not to do “whatever the police asked”. In 2005, aided by Charles Clarke, his home secretary, he ran scare stories that state security might demand the incarceration of up to 1,500 “known” terrorists uncharged for 90 days. John Reid, Clarke’s foolish successor, went further and claimed that Al-Qaeda’s threat to Britain was “worse than Hitler’s”.
Earlier this month Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, made a Downing Street-approved speech telling of 2,000 “known terrorists” who were “grooming” young people and children as suicide bombers “as I speak”. Evans did not explain why he had arrested none of them even for the permitted 28 days. The scaremongering was a crude prelude to a demand for more powers and resources.
This is not responsible government. Yet on the advice of a self-confessed “simple sailor” security adviser, Admiral Lord West, Brown is now to encircle Britain with an “e-border”. All comers and goers are to be electronically recorded and asked to supply addresses, phone numbers and computer details, up to 53 items of personal information. Officials are to be given powers to revoke visitor visas at immigration desks without appeal. It will make America’s draconian immigration control seem like open house.
Given the fallibility of government computers – the new e-border one is to cost an astronomical £650m – getting into, out of and about Britain will change from inconvenient to sheer hell. If a Brazilian, de Menezes, can be shot for looking Arabic and a normal Briton in a diabetic fit be Tasered and manacled for “looking Egyptian”, the mind boggles at the accidents waiting to happen.
To the health-and-safety regulariat is now to be added a terrorism one. Whitehall’s 450 counterterrorism officials (doing what all day?) are to be reinforced with hundreds more to run courses in terrorist detection for all staff in cinemas, theatres, hotels and shopping centres. They will be told how to control car stopping distances, the location of bollards and barriers and the use of CCTV. A new chain of bombproofed courtrooms is to be built to try the terrorist hordes. A new prosecutor is to be appointed to deal with hate speech and incitement.
The principle that a free democracy requires some personal risk to both VIPs and ordinary mortals has vanished in an avalanche of police overtime and equipment salesmanship. Security-obsessed officials and blame-averse ministers simply give in to any safety argument and pay up, citing the last bomb blast. It is the equivalent of closing all motorways because 3,000 people a year die on the roads.
At a recent Whitehall conference on “civil risk”, officials compared various threats to life and property. Top were motorway pile-ups, industrial explosions, fires, floods and food contaminations, along with the dissemination of drugs and organised crime. A terrorist bomb was way down the priority list, yet it was cock-of-the-walk for attention and resources. The mere mention sent ministers berserk.
The threat from an Islamist bomb clearly requires new types of policing from that applied to the IRA or to anarchist groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Militant Islamism is challenging in its ideology and its hold on particular ethnic groups. But with a few stark exceptions, the threat is amateur and apparently easier to stifle than previous ones. It calls for more intelligent community policing.
The explosion of a deadly bomb is always possible in an open society enjoying freedom of movement. It does not “threaten the nation” or destabilise its freedoms unless government so decides, in Brown’s case by altering the social, legal and physical infrastructure of the nation. Ministers seem unaware of this distinction. In capitulating to the terrorism industry they capitulate to the terrorist.
Were a Tory government introducing these measures, Jack Straw, Peter Hain, Harriet Harman and others would be howling about dictatorship. Instead they mutter “national security” and “if you knew what I know” and avert their eyes in shame. They are only obeying orders.
The result has reopened a division in British politics between what Isaiah Berlin called negative and positive concepts of freedom. The first is freedom to pursue individual liberty without interference by superior authority. The second is an enforced freedom to be safe and sound under a beneficent state. The latter is “owned”, defined and imposed from above and is mostly phoney, represented in Berlin’s day by Soviet communism. It lives on as a statist gene within the British Establishment.
Hence Blair would talk of the civil right to be safe from being blown up or threatened by Saddam Hussein as “overriding” the civil rights of an alleged terrorist. Brown has joined the same intellectual fraternity. Frightened of being depicted as “soft on terror”, he does not plead the cause of freedom against a demand for more police powers.
One remarkable consequence has been to end the customary response at Westminster, that “national security” justifies anything proposed by government. That line is no longer bought without question by the media, peers, Labour backbenchers (other than the most cringing) and even the Tory party.
Indeed Brown has pulled off a remarkable coup in unearthing a libertarian conscience within modern Conservatism. David Davis, the Tory home affairs spokesman, usually a walking-talking police state, admits he can find “no evidence whatsoever” of the need for 56 days’ detention. For once the Tories are on the side of liberty’s angels. They must stay there if the government’s fifth antiterrorism law in office is not to be followed by many more. The boundary is a fine one between a paranoid state and a police one.
The job of the security services is to propose to government what they think will make Britain as safe as the grave. The job of politicians is to put such proposals to the test of proportionality, value for money and civil liberty. It is now moot whether Britain’s politicians are up to that job.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
